Lord McKenzie of Luton: The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
	Letter to Lord Laird from the National Statistician, dated May 2006.
	As National Statistician, I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question to ask what the current average earnings are in each region of the United Kingdom. (HL5533)
	Average earnings are estimated from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), and are provided for full-time employees on adult rates whose pay for the survey period was not affected by absence. This is the standard definition used for ASHE. The ASHE does not collect data on the self-employed and people who do unpaid work.
	I attach a table showing average gross weekly earnings by government office region for the year 2005 for all full-time employees on adult rates. These statistics are already published on the National Statistics website at www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=13101.
	The ASHE, carried out in April each year, is the most comprehensive source of earnings information in the United Kingdom. It is a one per cent sample of all employees who are members of pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) schemes.
	
		Gross weekly(£) pay for full-time employee jobs(1) by place of work
		
			  Median Mean 
			 United Kingdom 431 517 
			 North-east 386 452 
			 North-west 407 480 
			 Yorkshire and the Humber 399 467 
			 East Midlands 407 469 
			 West Midlands 403 476 
			 South-west 401 473 
			 East 429 512 
			 London 556 698 
			 South-east 450 539 
			 Wales 390 454 
			 Scotland 410 480 
			 Northern Ireland 387 452 
		
	
	1 Employees on adult rates whose pay for the survey pay-period was not affected by absence.
	Guide to quality: the coefficient of variation (CV) indicates the quality of a figure, the smaller the CV value the higher the quality.
	The true value is likely to lie within +/- twice the CV eg: for an average of 200 with a CV of 5 per cent, we would expect the population average to be within the range 180 to 220.
	All the figures on this table have a CV of less than 5 per cent.
	The median replaces the mean as the headline statistic. The weighted mean is the sum of the weighted values divided by the sum of the weights. The median is the value below which 50 per cent. of employees fall. It is preferred over the mean for earnings data as it is influenced less by extreme values and because of the skewed distribution of earnings data.
	Source: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Office for National Statistics.

Lord McColl of Dulwich: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether the 2.5 per cent. levy on underspending National Health Service trusts, designed to support those trusts that have overspent, will impact more on trusts which serve mainly (a) urban, or (b) rural areas; and whether the levies will apply to all trusts that have broken even or made a profit.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The financial implications of amalgamating different levels of precept remain under consideration. We are presently working on transitional arrangements to allow for convergence of precepts over several years. We are committed to paying 100 per cent. of reasonable set-up revenue and capital costs of restructuring, net of reasonable savings. The projected level of these costs and savings is a matter for negotiations currently taking place.